This invention relates to news feeds in online systems and in particular to using machine learning for ranking emails and presenting them as news feed of an online system.
In a work environment, many different systems are used to allow collaboration and communication between employees. These include email, an organizational intranet (e.g., a network service such as a web server accessible only via the local area network (LAN) of the organization), electronic bulletin boards, voice over Internet Protocol (IP), instant messaging tools, and so on. However, these systems are completely separate from each other in many cases. For example, a user may use an email software application on a client device connected to an email server to retrieve his or her email, and may then use a web browser application to access a company intranet located on a different server. Each system typically requires different ways of interacting with the system, access rights, passwords, and so on. This creates additional complexities for users of the systems.
Furthermore, although the means of collaboration between users have increased (e.g., instant messaging), most systems used in a workplace have not changed significantly in the manner in which information is presented to the user. For example, emails are still delivered and viewed in a similar fashion to real physical mail. A user receives in his or her “inbox” a listing of messages that have been addressed to that user, in a chronological, alphabetical, or other simple order. There is no indication to the user of which emails may be important. Instead, due to the design of the system, a user typically looks through his or her emails chronologically from the oldest unread to the most recent unread messages. Accordingly, using conventional systems, the user may fail to respond quickly to an important email, or the system may cause inefficiencies for the user as the user may process many unread emails that are not important (e.g., informational notices, newsletter emails, spam).
Some organizations use an online system (e.g., a social networking system) as a tool for facilitating collaboration between users. Such collaboration may be performed using groups, events, and other activities using the online system. Such online systems allow users to perform various actions including posting of comments, posting of status updates, transactions, “likes” of other content uploaded to the online system, and uploads of files such as presentations, images, and videos. The online system presents information describing various actions taken by other users to a user as news feed stories, also referred to herein as stories, the news feed, or feed stories. However, such an online system only provides information describing actions performed using the online system. Information describing actions performed outside the online system, such as those performed using an email system as described above, are not accessible to the online system. The user has to interact with each system separately to access information available in the system. Thus, conventional techniques for collaboration or communication within an organization are often cumbersome to use and inefficient for users.